It’s essay writing season for tons of students!

After being a college writing tutor for over a year, I thought I would share my advice with all you awesome people on tumblr. This is how I write essays, but if you’ve got more tips, feel free to add them below. 

Okay, but check out this video from mid-May 2022 of a Kestrel Dad who just kept piling up voles and mice beside his babies when the mom was injured/killed/mia’d by owls…but then watched one of his babies just swallow a lizard and went “OH. I can feed them small food!” and learned to tear it apart!

….the three chicks who were taken out of the nest for intensive care after the mom disappeared were put back in, and he just started feeding them, too.

• a customer asking me if boys like coloring

• a customer telling her daughter she can’t give out ice cream stickers for party favors because there will be boys there

• an older couple laughing about how there’s a pink toy sword because a boy would never play with a pink toy sword (because i guess boys can’t like pink and girls don’t play with toy swords. also it wasn’t even pink it was red lol)

• a customer refusing to buy a snail robot kit for his nephew because it was “too cute for a boy”

• a customer sharply reminding me she was buying a gift for a boy when i suggested play food

• a customer telling her daughter she needed to pick a different birthday card for her friend because the one she chose had a pink envelope (her friend was a boy)

• a customer asking what a boy would like for valentine’s day instead of the stuffed dogs she was getting for the girls

• a customer getting upset when my coworker used blue ribbon on a gift bag because the present was for a girl

• a customer saying a toy guitar was “too girly” for her grandson, based only on the fact that the box had a picture of a girl playing with it (the guitar was red with yellow music notes)

So... we are introduced to Scrooge when he is right in the middle of explaining his System to the gentlemen collecting for charity. His taxes pay for prisons and work-houses, and therefore it is not his responsibility to help "idle people" (ie - people who don't want to spend every waking moment working, the way he does.) If people would rather die than go to prisons or work houses - and this is the 19th century so they're REALLY BAD - then "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

So Scrooge looks like a Bird primary. But I don't think he is one. Because the rest of his story is SO Snake.

What first gets him crying in the Past section is the ghost calling him a "solitary child, neglected by his friends." And he is. Young Ebenezer is also neglected by his family - it's unclear exactly what's going on at home, but his father has sent him away to boarding school to rot, and it's only his little sister Fan who somehow convinces him to let Ebenezer come home.

Fan gets cut out of adaptations a lot, but she's important to Scrooge. After she dies giving birth to Fred, Scrooge can't even bear to look at his nephew. So I think what we're looking at is a really, really Burnt Snake primary who looks like a miserable Idealist because - in the absence of People - at least it's something. It's also interesting how the classic Burnt Snake hedonism has manifested in Scrooge as a sort of anti-hedonism... but functionally it works the same way. An extreme focus on yourself and your body.

I think Scrooge's ex-fiancee Belle has him figured out when she says "Another idol [Gain] has displaced me (...) You fear the world too much. All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach." Scrooge is so scared of being hurt hat he's made himself into this person who the world can't hurt. Which is why he can't recognize suffering in others, he's too cutoff from his own pain.

All his other lessons are just as Snake-flavored. Bob Cratchit gets through to him because dear GOD that man is a loud Snake primary. And the Future sequence? When Scrooge is dead with no one to morn him? The nightmarish horror of that to a Snake primary.

And in terms of his secondary... Scrooge spends most of the story with a really burnt secondary as well. He doesn't enjoy anything. And then there's the very end, after he gets his second chance:

"He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows: and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk -- that anything -- could give him so much happiness."

He's enjoying life, and he's doing it in a super Badger secondary way. His "founder of the feast" redemption moment is ALL about building community. We also know that young, lonely Ebenezer made a kind of imaginary friend community out of book characters which is... really sad, and really relatable. And well, he is literally a bookkeeper, so I guess Bookkeeper Badger fits there too.